I hate to say it but I am about to reach the point in my preparation for the future where the maintance on what I have done requires enough of my reserves of time and energy that I am severly limited in what new undertakings I would like to embrace. Weeds have overtaken 30% of the garden. Walking onions need to be divided. I am way behind in splitting and stacking firewood for the coming winter. Several projects I had slatted for this year, I am now realizing, will not be started, let alone brought to completion.

What am I to do? The question arises because the issue has as much to do with a depletion of my "get up and go" as it does a strict limitation of time and resources. I sleep more on my weekends home, drink coffee later and call it a day earlier. I am just drained of the willingness to tackle something new or at least the new that requires planning for the absolute worse case scenerio.

Consequently I am planning and working for the "not as bad" scenerio....

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Wendell Berry has written at length regarding the colonization of rural areas by urban economic interests. Like any other colony, rural areas are stripped of their raw materials: their minerals, their soil, their best and brightest young people and sold finished products from the cities. In one of his essays Mr. Berry even complains memorably that even the pastors that are assigned to rural areas are interns who are just biding their time, waiting to get a better assignment in the city and, as such, are not really invested in the people they are called to serve today.

Even if they lack a liberation vocabulary to give voice to their frustration, the frustration of the colonized is felt in many rural areas. Upon successfully completing my first interrogation by neighbors when we moved to our current location they disclosed a disdain for the "big city millionaires" who build their McMansions near...

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High Rise by J.G. Ballard 134 pages
Amazon Link but by all means check it out from your local library

Set in a 40 story apartment building this taste of light fiction takes up the theme of Lord of the Flies with an alternative setting and similar, but not identical insights, into human psychological devolution. The story line follows the experience of three primary characters as a high rise full of professionals experiences an inexplicable transition into a tribal jungle of concrete, staircases, concourses and piles of garbage.

As the transformation begins the residents find the psychological outlet of the conflict more satisfying than their professional lives. They conspire to keep the authorities away from their island of primative battles and each night brings an escalation of the de-civilization of the night before. Darwinian...

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A few weeks ago construction unceramoniously threw me off of the interstate and back into the neighborhoods of Minneapolis/St. Paul. As I followed my route and drove through a very nice (and expensive) neighborhood of St. Paul. I enjoyed the older, modest bet very well kept homes of that upper 10% of the metropolitian area which chooses to live within the traditional boundaries of St. Paul. Had I driven through at a different time the scenic path near the river would be full of beautiful people jogging and biking, talking and sauntering. All fairly oblivious to their privlidge and what lays beyond the natural boundary that I was seeking to cross.

Crossing the river into Minneapolis one immedietly enters a space of high rise apartments occupied, primarily, by immigrants. Three hundred yards from executives, consultants, tenured professors, lawyers and surgeons live cab drivers, hospital cleaning staff and the lady who gets you your latte.

On one side of the bridge are the people...

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From Monday's NYTimes Blog

My mother’s illusion came to an end when, one day, her labor camp cat stopped coming. She never learned exactly what happened to it. Unfortunately, that became a template for nameless outcomes by which her sister, her father, and most of her friends disappeared. Of her many illusions of youth that the Nazis snuffed out, the feeling that she could control her destiny was one of the most difficult to accept. But for my mother, and for all those who lived through similar experiences, surviving meant not only possessing a special toughness of body, but also of mind. She found a way to face the world without the illusion of control, of dealing with life as it comes, day to day, without expectation.

This is, in my mind, the key to mental preparation: to be completely clear on what one can and cannot control, to be fully a...

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